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Turn a quarter of program data into a funder report

Today

The report is due Friday. You have an attendance spreadsheet, three paragraphs from the program manager, the original proposal somewhere in your email, and a blank portal form with eight questions in it. You write it Thursday night and hope the numbers line up with what you promised.

With Claude

You paste the funder's own questions, the proposal objectives, and the figures your program team already verified, and you get a draft answering each question in the funder's order. Anywhere you did not give it data, it says so instead of writing something that sounds right.

The prompt

Paste this into claude.ai and replace anything in brackets.

You are helping the executive director of a US nonprofit draft a report to a funder. You have no access to our program records, so you must not estimate, infer, round, project, or fill in any number, outcome, or participant count. Use only what I give you below, exactly as I wrote it.

The funder and the grant:
[funder name, grant name, award period, and the award amount if you want it referenced]

The funder's exact report questions and any word limits, pasted from their portal or reporting form:
[paste the questions here]

What we said we would do, from the original proposal or grant agreement:
[paste the objectives, activities, and any targets]

What actually happened, from our own records:
[paste your verified figures and notes: people served, sessions held, attendance, waitlist, referrals, completion counts, staffing]

Program staff notes, including anything that went sideways:
[paste the program manager's notes: delays, turnover, a partner falling through, a change in who actually showed up]

Do this:

1. Answer each funder question in their order, under their own headings, inside any word limit they set.
2. Quote every figure exactly as I wrote it. Never combine two of my numbers into a new one, never convert a count into a percentage, and never state a number I did not give you.
3. Where a question needs data I did not provide, write MISSING DATA in that answer and add the question to a list at the end titled What we still need before this can be submitted. Do not write a plausible answer in its place.
4. Where results came in under what we promised, write the honest version: what happened, what we learned from it, and what we are changing. Do not soften it into nothing and do not apologize three times.
5. Keep the language plain and specific. No sentences about being passionate, no transforming lives, no stacked adjectives.
6. Finish with a list of every claim in the draft that a program person has to verify before this is submitted.

If my figures and the funder's questions do not line up, ask me about it before you draft.

What to skip in nonprofits and associations

  • Claude does not know what your programs did, and it must never be the source of a number in a grant report. It will produce a participant count, a completion rate, or an impact figure that reads perfectly and is fiction. A fabricated figure in a funder report is not an editing mistake, it is a false statement to a funder, and on a federal award it is a legal matter rather than a writing one. Every figure comes from your own case management, attendance, or accounting records. The prompts above tell Claude to write MISSING DATA and stop, and the whole approach depends on you holding it to that.
  • Donor records do not belong in a consumer chat window. That means names, addresses, giving history, pledge balances, wealth screening notes, employer and matching gift details, and anything carrying a card or bank number. On Free, Pro, and Max plans whether your chats are used to improve Anthropic's models is controlled by the model improvement setting in your Privacy Settings, so open it and decide on purpose instead of assuming, and know that conversations flagged for safety review are a separate exception to that setting. Commercial plans, meaning Team, Enterprise, and Claude for Work, exclude inputs from model training by default. Either way your own donor privacy policy is a promise you already made, so work from initials and placeholders and paste one letter at a time rather than exporting your CRM.
  • No grant submission goes out without a person who runs the program reading every claim in it. Claude will restate an objective in language that sounds better than what your program actually does, and it will happily describe an activity you dropped two years ago because it was in the proposal you pasted. It also cannot see the funder's current guidelines, eligibility rules, or allowable costs unless you paste them in. Someone who knows the program checks the claims, someone who knows the budget checks the costs, and a named human signs. The same goes for your 990 narrative and any response to an audit management letter.

Want all 4 workflows for nonprofits and associations in your inbox?

Every prompt on this page plus the rest, so you still have them on Monday. One email, then four short ones on making it stick. Unsubscribe any time.

Or answer four questions and Claude writes three workflows for your specific business rather than the industry generally.

Before you try it

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